Your tagline is a short phrase or sentence that does the heavy lifting when it comes to setting context for your blog and helping readers to quickly learn what it is you’re writing about. Today, we’ll share some of our favorite taglines to help inspire you to create something unique and original for your site.

A teeny tiny bit of hyperbole

Here are some things you might want to avoid to help your tagline stand out in the crowd:

Avoid repeating your site title. Your tagline is a space to share some context on what your site is about. Take advantage of it.

Keep it short and sweet. Thirty and 40 word taglines leave us breathless. Be concise.

Be original. Don’t let your blog’s tagline become another in the sea of “musings about thoughts.”

Blogger Kathy V.‘s hilarious tagline, “Because they let you become a parent even though you have NO IDEA what you’re doing” at Don’t Forget to Feed the Baby is the perfect introduction to her blog. Her tagline reflects the humor and sass she uses in her posts. Parents among her readership will no doubt relate to the never-ending joys, fears, and frustrations of ministering to an infant’s needs.

A play on words

Some of you might recognize our Michelle W. from such places as Blogging U. As a photographer, Michelle shares her work at Pictures of Things. Her tagline, “Life in fifty nifty millimeters,” reflects her penchant for documenting her life and travels using a fifty millimeter lens, known as the “nifty fifty” in photographic circles.

Maximize with metaphor

Junk is a literary magazine featuring work from authors such as Cheryl Strayed. The word “junk” is also a street name for heroin, and Junk‘s tagline, “A literary fix” is a twist on the drug metaphor where, in this case, great reading delivers the high. Check out Junk‘s about page for more on the metaphor behind the magazine.

The salient quote

Using a favorite quotation as your tagline is a great way to inspire readers and help them understand your blog’s vision at the same time. At Imperfect Happiness, blogger Charity uses a Mary Oliver quote to welcome readers to her blog, which was inspired by Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project.

Get them laughing

UPWITSCREEK is a play on the English phrase “Up sh*t’s creek without a paddle,” referring to being in a canoe travelling in a river of excrement without a steering mechanism — a funny way to communicate that you’re in trouble and not sure how to get out of it, without getting muck all over you. Lisa Goodwin’s tagline, “Welcome to my world, grab a paddle,” is a cheeky variation on the phrase with a fun invitation to readers to join her for the ride.

I’m a writer, and I used to end a lot of my short stories the same way: “Suddenly they all died. The end.” I thought it made for a pretty fantastic blog title. But for my tagline, I let my natural geekiness shine through by taking a cue from Yoda. Instead of, “Do or do not – there is no try,” I’ve got, “Write or write not – there is no aspiring.”

I love wordplay, and I know I’ve seen a dozen others that do it well, but for the life of me, I can’t think of them at the moment. The examples here are all great, though, and I think my favorite might be UPWITSCREEK. That one’s just hilarious. 🙂

Kinda sets it up to be a right-moderate political blog (which, actually, was the original intention), but I decided to go the less exhausting route and dish out absurdist/satirical humor instead. But it’s just. So. Catchy.

Really love your examples! My tagline is quite boring in comparison, but no one will ever know because I can’t make it visible. I have it set up in “Settings~General~Tagline” and in “Appearance~Header~Show header text with your image” and in “Custimize~Site Title~Tagline~Display Header Text.” What’s strange is that the tagline used to be there and I didn’t notice exactly when it disappeared.

Hi Dani, your theme, “Pilcrow” doesn’t show the tagline. It’s just a function of the way your theme is designed. The theme showcase is a great place to check out if you want to explore other themes that show taglines.

My tagline “a handcrafted forest of fun” is a play on my name. Mori is a Japanese pronunciation of my last name, and means forest in the same language. Since my main themes are nature and Japanese/Celtic inspired artisan projects it works for me^^